Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are partnering with the city of Oak Ridge to develop UrbanSense, a comprehensive sensor network and real-time visualization platform that helps cities evaluate trends in urban activity.
The project, initiated by ORNL’s Urban Dynamics Institute, centers on addressing cities’ real-world challenges through applied urban science.
“Preparing for urban growth and planning for future infrastructure development and resource demands are global problems, but cities need ways to be proactive on a local level,” said UDI director Budhendra Bhaduri. “Our goal in bringing science to cities is to put the right tools and resources in the hands of city managers and urban planners so that they can assess local impacts and make strategic decisions to get the best return on future investments.”
Shannon Capone Kirk runs the e-discovery practice at Ropes & Gray, a prestigious global law firm with panoramic views of the Boston skyline.
In order to understand what she does these days, she insists you need to understand what life was like when she entered the profession in the late ’90s; her first job was “document review.”
“What that meant was literally spending weeks upon weeks in either a warehouse or a conference room flipping through bankers boxes and reading documents, paper documents,” said Kirk.
Most community college students are nontraditional — adults, parents, people with full-time jobs, people returning to school after years away. They often enroll part-time, taking longer to graduate than the three years the Education Department used to gauge the success of people pursuing two-year degrees. Many community college students also transfer to four-year colleges before finishing a degree — a good result, but one that wasn’t counted for graduation rates.
So, following the committee’s lead, education officials made several changes. They included part-time and returning students in the calculation. They extended the time period to eight years. And they made separate calculations of how many students transferred before graduation, and how many were still in college.
The results paint a very different picture of community college success.
Company Data Science News
A customer service employee at Twitterdeactivated @realDonaldTrump on that employee’s last day of employment. The account was restored 11 minutes later. The twitterverse had much to say, as evidenced in our Tweet of the Week.
Facebook testified in front of a Congressional committee investigating the influence of Russia on the last US election. The company reported that $100,000 of Russian-linked ads reached 126 million account holders. (I’m impressed that there is any way to reach 126 million people for only $100,000.) The ads were designed to “foment discord” among Americans around hot button issues like LGBTQ rights. Mark Zuckerberg has promised more transparency and accountability for campaign ad purchases going forward. Lawmakers are unlikely to accept those promises (and the promises of Twitter leaders) at face value and may introduce legislation to regulate political ads on social media.
Apple crushed their revenue targets for Q3, upped expectations for Q4, and is once again the most profitable company in the world. Sales of the iPhone X start this Friday and are expected to boost revenues even higher for at least the next two quarters. That said, a recent study found that people are waiting longer between new phone purchases. Maybe the iPhone X launch will unleash a torrent of lagged upgrades.
Adobe awarded grants of $50,000 each to 14 schools, including NYU, University of Maryland, MIT, and Drexel to foster data science. Far be it from me to scoff at grant money, but I hope the application and reporting processes are lightweight for such small amounts. We will not be able to fill the gaps from missing federal research overhead with $50,000 grants (Trump has proposed to cut overhead rates dramatically).
Butterfly Network is a start up led by Jonathan Rothberg that will offer a handheld ultrasound that connects to smart phones for $2,000 starting next year. Talk about shifting the balance of power between doctors and patients!
Scripps Research uses 23andMe data to allow individuals to estimate their likelihood of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. The idea is that patients who see they are at risk may be incentivized to make diet and lifestyle changes that could keep them healthier for longer. This week is full of patient-empowering technologies.
Google.org has awarded $1 million to the Hidden Genius Project, an Oakland based non-profit that aims to increase the participation of young black men in tech. Already, “they’ve reached more than 1,700 Bay Area students through their 15-month intensive CS and entrepreneurship bootcamp program” with projects in sports analytics, basic programming, and video game design. What an excellent program. Fifteen months is a meaningful amount of time. I’m so impressed that I kind of want to copy what they’re doing.
Sarcos Robotics made a public commitment never to produce weaponized robots. Instead, they will focus on “saving lives” and workplace health and safety, including the prevention of debilitating back injuries.
Borrowing shamelessly from Amazon, “eBay today is launching two new visual search tools that will allow online shoppers to use photos they snap, have saved on their phone, or even those they find while browsing the web or other social networking sites, in order to find matching products from eBay’s catalog.” This is clearly a great way for efficiently shopping the internet’s biggest flea market.
Megvii, a Chinese image recognition company more commonly known as Face++ (旷视科技), “has closed their Series C funding round at a staggering US$460 million.” The technology has been used “20 billion times on 500 million devices” including in Chinese police departments to identify and arrest people who have skipped bail. This is a big company to watch for a variety of reasons.
Microsoft is switching to fuel cell energy technology in its processing centers with huge positive benefits to their bottom line and the environment. Classic win-win.
A magical way to enjoy Disney’s magic kingdom: with an app, Touring Plans, that plans your ride-by-ride itinerary based on its predictions of line length that are “freakishly accurate.” It can also offer forecasts for days of particularly low traffic for vacation planning purposes. Disney without the lines is a whole new world.
The wunderkind is Kevin Frans, a senior currently working on his college applications. He trained his first neural net—the kind of system that tech giants use to recognize your voice or face—two years ago, at the age of 15. Inspired by reports of software mastering Atari games and the board game Go, he has since been reading research papers and building pieces of what they described. “I like how you can get computers to do things that previously you would think were impossible,” Frans says, flashing his ready smile. One of his creations is an interactive webpage that automatically colors in line drawings, in the style of manga comics.
Frans landed at OpenAI after taking on one of the lab’s list of problems in need of new ideas.
Women in Computer Vision is a series of interviews conducted by our Marketing Manager Ralph Anzarouth and published on RSIP Vision publications: every month on Computer Vision News and every day on the daily magazines that we produce for the main conferences in our profession: CVPR, ECCV, MICCAI, CARS and ICCV. When appropriate, the interview is published under the title “Women in Science” instead of “Women in Computer Vision“.
The idea of running this series of interviews came during a discussion with Olga Russakovsky at CVPR2016. Our main goal is to give a voice to a minority group in our community, as a tiny contribution to mitigate the gender imbalance we all know about. More importantly, it proposes a very large and diverse choice of role models, who can serve as examples to younger students and professionals at the beginning of their careers.
The global financial system can be represented as a large complex network in which banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions are interconnected to each other through visible and invisible financial linkages. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to the understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to a breakdown of this network. This can happen when the existing financial links turn from being a means of risk diversification to channels for the propagation of risk across financial institutions. In this review article, we summarize recent developments in the modeling of financial systemic risk. We focus in particular on network approaches, such as models of default cascades due to bilateral exposures or to overlapping portfolios, and we also report on recent findings on the empirical structure of interbank networks. The current review provides a landscape of the newly arising interdisciplinary field lying at the intersection of several disciplines, such as network science, physics, engineering, economics, and ecology.
Microsoft Corp. is moving to use fuel cells at its power-hungry server farms, saying the technology may double the efficiency of energy used.
The software company is testing how it can use the devices to generate electricity and plans to install a 10-megawatt fuel cell within a few years at a cost of about $45 million.
“This technology is very, very disruptive, and we’re investing a lot of time and money into it,” said Sean James, principal research program manager at Microsoft’s R&D program on energy strategy. “We could almost double the energy efficiency. We’ve been able to model and measure in the lab that with fuel cells.”
arXiv, Computer Science > Social and Information Networks; Kansuke Ikehara, Aaron Clauset
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The structure of complex networks has been of interest in many scientific and engineering disciplines over the decades. A number of studies in the field have been focused on finding the common properties among different kinds of networks such as heavy-tail degree distribution, small-worldness and modular structure and they have tried to establish a theory of structural universality in complex networks. However, there is no comprehensive study of network structure across a diverse set of domains in order to explain the structural diversity we observe in the real-world networks. In this paper, we study 986 real-world networks of diverse domains ranging from ecological food webs to online social networks along with 575 networks generated from four popular network models. Our study utilizes a number of machine learning techniques such as random forest and confusion matrix in order to show the relationships among network domains in terms of network structure. Our results indicate that there are some partitions of network categories in which networks are hard to distinguish based purely on network structure. We have found that these partitions of network categories tend to have similar underlying functions, constraints and/or generative mechanisms of networks even though networks in the same partition have different origins, e.g., biological processes, results of engineering by human being, etc. This suggests that the origin of a network, whether it’s biological, technological or social, may not necessarily be a decisive factor of the formation of similar network structure. Our findings shed light on the possible direction along which we could uncover the hidden principles for the structural diversity of complex networks.
Extra Extra
Words that I never thought would appear in the data science newsletter: “as a sex-crazed neurotic, I think you know where I stand.” That is not a self-quote, it’s from a guy named Dale Markowitz in his review of a new AI+Twitter powered online dating app that tells you your ‘type’ and then how to work around your weaknesses to attract a love interest.
Health2047 has spun out a technology company to share health data between patients, physicians, healthcare facilities, payers, pharma and other healthcare enterprises, according to a news release.
Health2047 closed a $10 million Series A round for Health2047 Switch, but the spinout also received another $12 million, the release said.
The move follows the addition of Celgene as a collaboration partner last month. The pharma company was brought on board by Health 2047 to help build the health data transfer business. Doug Given, Health2047 CEO, explained at the time that there was an interest in developing a way to move data more effectively between pharmacies, patients, and physicians.
Washington, DC “ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention hell-bent on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical infosec issues.” Deadline for papers’ submissions is November 19.
ProPublica, Source: An OpenNews project, Lena Groeger
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Forms. They’re the often-tedious tasks that stand in the way of an online purchase, seeing the doctor, or filing your taxes. They may be boring, but they have tremendous power.
Whether you’re filling out a form or building it yourself, you should be aware that decisions about how to design a form have all kinds of hidden consequences. How you ask a question, the order of questions, the wording and format of the questions, even whether a question is included at all—all affect the final result. Let’s take a look at how.
“As if giving the world its AI framework wasn’t enough, Google is now letting others work with a once-internal development tool, Colaboratory.”
“The software works a lot like Google Docs, its document collaboration tool, but with the ability to run code and show that code’s output within the document. Colaboratory is free and built on top of the open-source Jupyter project, software often used in data science.”
“This is an implementation of Mask R-CNN on Python 3, Keras, and TensorFlow. The model generates bounding boxes and segmentation masks for each instance of an object in the image. It’s based on Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a ResNet101 backbone.”
he Linux Foundation introduced a new project Monday called the Acumos Project, an effort backed by AT&T and India’s Tech Mahindra that will set up a common platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning development.
“With the Acumos platform, we’re working to create an industry standard for making AI applications and models reusable and easily accessible to any developer,” The Linux Foundation wrote in a blog post announcing the effort. AT&T and Tech Mahindra, a large IT consulting company based in Mumbai, will provide code for the initial phase of the project. It’s expected to launch early next year.